Sims Online gets second life

Now the question is: will The Sims Online (TSO)'s, now dubbed EA-Land, bid to become the next big simolean come up "a day late and a (linden) dollar short?"

TSO arrived at the virtual gate just a bit before Second Life. Unlike the new runner, it came with an impressive pedigree, having been a No. 1 computer game with millions of sales and, presumably, users. A lot of good money was probably expecting that to translate well to the MMO field. The bets were on. But at first go, TSO's eyes weren't on that skinny new horse, Second Life, saddled with the rather odd notion of a non-gaming virtual world, but on the lead thoroughbred, the one with all the derby crowns and the prize money to boot: Blizzard's World of Warcraft (WoW). As it turned out, TSO failed to win, place, or even show. Second Life continued to run just happy to be in the race, and would eventually come to dominate the non-gaming track. TSO could still be seen on the field, but in time, it became obvious its running days were over. Those who wanted to remember it fondly from its game incarnations kindly said it was in semi-retirement. Others looked to TSO's lack of motion, the cloud of bad buzz hovering around it, and the stench of failure permeating from it's direction and concluded that it was, in fact, a dead horse.

As it turned out, TSO was running the wrong race. The strengths of the computer and console game: the ability to craft a personal environment, meddle in virtual lives with god-like powers, and hone one's stable of sims to better or worse ends, were best enjoyed as a solo venture. These sorts of activities did not translate well to a multi-player environment. The attempts to instill some sort of multiplayer gaming activity overlay were said to be non-productive and boring. And one of the core strengths of The Sims game, the ability to create objects, houses, neighbourhoods and share them with other players, was not allowed for in its online incarnation, essentially alienating this core and beneficial group of users who enjoyed creation more than "playing." By the time user-created content was somewhat allowed, TSO was already a non-entity, nearly abandoned by its owners, and populated only by small cadre of hard-core users. As an MMO game, it had failed.

Had the owners of TSO and The Sims seen the growing interest and potential in social virtual worlds and the Social Web, and had they not been so fixated on the gaming and monthly revenue model, they might have taken similar steps as Linden Lab. They might have fostered a game economy that tied to real currency, the concept of personal space in virtual land ownership, and the notion of the sim avatar not as a gaming construct but as a personal extension of self. Had they done those things, they might have shifted gears, providing more avenues for social venture as the main raison d'etre for TSO. They might have reopened the flood gates for uploading user-generated content. After all, having dedicated modelers (modders) who actually like to make content to share is like having a club where the patrons bring the booze, food, and music and are happy to pay for the privilege. Looking back, imagine the what-if had TSO done all these things and to boot offered a free downloadable client and access, realizing that their "game" was never going to be another WoW, but that it had the chance for a successful niche nonetheless for social users and modders. What if they had also made each install and supplement of the game function as well as an online client and as a bonus come with both game and online objects, homes, and neighbourhood access that could only be found by buying the supplements? On start-up, one could have had the option to log into personal space or into the communal grid. I mean, as virtual worlds of all sorts have shown, there's a passion for virtual kitsch hoarding. With the ability to use registered product keys for existing customers to get their online goodies retroactively, and the notion of fostering the communal online grid as a means of collecting even more objects and additions, even if the sole intention was just to use them in the installed version, owner, Electronic Arts (EA) would have seen existing players enticed to at least try out the online version and likely return. Online players would have been eager to buy the next install supplement, if only to get the proprietary additions that such offered. The installed versions could even have been marketed as good modder tools, a way to actually create and share new content. Online and install, each would aid the other.

Had this been done, the existing user-base and modder community already existing in The Sims could have provided both an overwhelming head-start in numbers, and a defined activity in the form of modding environments and objects, and an active core user base, who were willing to add content on their own time with no cost to EA. Second Life had the same thing I suppose but they were just getting started. The thousands upon thousands of existing Sim objects, landscapes, buildings, already in existence, most of them free, would create a tsunami-like inundation of rich content comparison that would swamp any challengers. Even the fact that Second Life was a fully realized three-dimensional space compared to TSO's 2d/3d rendering I think would have worked in TSO's favor since mainstream computers then lacked a lot of the graphical power to work well with something like Second Life, whereas they would function just fine, or certainly better, with a graphic rendering already tested and applied in the desktop version. And a focus on social activity but keeping and expanding on the gaming functions of the failed version, adding things like maybe How to Host a Murder sharded "dungeons" etc, would have given TSO as a social world something still today very lacking in Second Life, more fun activities to help embellish and support the social function. Increased sales of games and supplements by online players as well as increased use of the online version by installed players, finally add to that a modest surcharge for uploading user-generated content and EA would have seen a healthy revenue stream. I doubt Second Life would have survived such competition and I suspect that the virtual landscape would have seen TSO as the WoW equivalent to the non-gaming set.

But hindsight is 20/20. And the leap of faith taken by Linden Lab and Philip Rosedale in establishing Second Life in the face of conventional wisdom is to their credit and it is the reason why Second Life, not TSO, is synonymous with virtual worlds in the minds of the general public. EA was only dabbling in online gaming, though I suspect with high hopes. I imagine the focus of developer, Maxis, and parent company, EA, was always more on development for the next Sims incarnation, The Sims 2. And that was the smart move. Game sales were a proven success and The Sims 2 went on to foster a whole new set of users and aficionados (my niece for example) as well as keeping the franchise healthy and active. Success is proven by the never-ending, it seems, list of supplements that can be purchased. And there are rumours of a Sims 3 on the way. So there's nothing to really fault Maxis/EA for dropping TSO. I can conjecture the "what if" and they might be thinking the same. But, a censured world like TSO would have been, and that EA-Land will be, for modded material would not have satisfied those who sought more adult activities, like gambling, etc. Those activities underscored much of the initial growth of Second Life, just as they did on a much larger scale for the Internet in general. Even the Sims enjoyed a fair bit of risque modding judging by some downloads. It was not the issue for the Sims because each install was a "world" unto itself. Having the desire for more "exposure" in a communal setting and not having an outlet might lead to dissatisfaction if such users turn out to be significant in numbers. And as far as the dress code, if one were to judge by a lot of the stuff one sees in Second Life, perhaps social worlds have to at least allow for King Crap and Queen Skank strutting their stuff as there seems to be a significant number of users who seem to enjoy the expressive freedom for this kind of display. Freedom of expression, I propose, will ultimately be more attractive and lack of censorship is one of the reasons for Web growth and adoption in general among adults. And this equates also to scripting and construction. Second Life constructs have the potential to be much more powerful, having nearly limitless underlying functional properties, whereas those embedded in Sims objects seem to be purely for manipulating game parameters: useless in a broader social sense beyond their cosmetic features. To say that a TSO that undertook some of the popular conventions of Second Life, as EA-Land proposes to adopt now, would have made TSO the dominant social virtual world (or least a successful venture as opposed to an outright failure) is not the same as saying that TSO would be either the most successful non-gaming virtual world ultimately (not even Second Life can knowingly claim that) or by extension, some sort of 3d incarnation of the next Web.

So given these realities, how does this new old version of a virtual world shape up now that it's found itself, supposedly? Well, I won't be able to judge until I'm able to get in. But on the surface, I wonder if it wouldn't have been better to have created a version of the Sims 2 (or 3) that mimicked an online version of that incarnation, which as I understand it, is a fully realized 3d space. Since user content was essentially denied for most practical purposes, it would have been a lot easier to make this migration for existing TSO users (just translate the existing objects) before opening the floodgates to user mods. Once they happen, it will be much harder, akin to impossible, to make the migration to a new graphical look, ala Sims 2/3, without abandoning some user content. People apparently think that the 2d/3d graphical use, being as it is popular in worlds like Habbo, which has users in the millions, means that there is nothing to worry about in the lack of graphic panache - and they could very well be right. But an online Sims 2 would be more akin to existing virtual worlds that EA-Land will be compared to by users first trying it out. Again, just my gut feeling that a more realistic virtual space will have the legs for the final race to who ultimately succeeds as a virtual worlds vendor for adults.

But maybe trying to capture the adult virtual landscape isn't what EA is really after. If EA is just, like so many companies with a wealth of media titles to offer, trying to establish it's own virtual gateway for its products and test the virtual waters, then I think the reincarnation of TSO as EA-Land could be a great success and is a wise move given the cost to reinvigorate an existing property rather than create it anew. EA has a lot of titles and the course of advertising and trying to entice users of EA land to explore some of these could be a bridge to offering what a lot of social virtual worlds lack, fun activities beyond the scope of social, shopping, and roleplaying. Many EA titles are going to appeal more to a younger crowd. A Sims-like incarnation, sharing as it does, the 2d/3d aspect of worlds popular with young children, might find a good niche in that space in-between when children are older than the Habbo Hotel, Club Penguin set, but younger than MTV Virtual Worlds users, say ages 9 - 13 years old. I think that could be a recipe for success. EA-Land looks more like worlds they're coming from but more sophisticated. It's a safe environment; it's social; it has more options for them to contribute, and hopefully will have some fun activities to keep them engaged. Thing is, I think if EA-Land can capture this market demographic and offer activities that would appeal to them as they got older, they'd have the adult crowd of tomorrow and younger users today just might stick with something like EA-Land as they got older, rather than trekking over to another offering en masse. But to achieve this, there must be a realization that the same steps that might have made The Sims Online a raging success when there was hardly any competition years ago are not going to have the same impact today. Couple to that the likely reality that many fans of the original The Sims game have probably migrated and cannot be considered to still offer the overwhelming figure they might once have been, both as users and contributors. Considering that children's virtual worlds are the most successful to date, the retro appearance of EA-Land can play to its favor if it were to be rethought of in terms of whom it is intended to target.

This is all good conjecture. But I'm still a little confused though who EA-Land is actually intended to appeal to for the here-and-now. The Play-doh logo makes me think children. EA games tie-ins, if they even exist, would appeal to a broad range but shifting more to the younger demographics. But the demographic of the original game, and any TSO returnees, are going to be older. Also the notions of a real currency equation, virtual real estate market, and Facebook tie-ins make me think of adult users.

So can TSO make a successful go of it in this crowded list of virtual worlds? Again, I really need at some point to get into the sim to see for myself, and that will need some precious weekend time for that, but on the surface, my list of pros and cons to offer for consideration toward answering that question are as follows:

Pros

• Product recognition - people are generally aware of The Sims, even if they didn't play it
• Adopting conventions of virtual land "ownership," currency, user-generated content, and other Second Life conventions should help make EA-Land what TSO could/should have been
• Continued thriving user-base that can be tapped into (The Sims is still sold, supported, and used by fans of the game)
• EA has an impressive list of titles and could/should expand EA-Land to be a springboard for all of these - hopefully with free content that could not only further interest and sales but as well, help provide activity content.
• Online version could stimulate games sales and vice versa (they really need to think about how to bridge these products, if not my suggestions above, some way)
• Thousands of mods online, some better than the original content, potentially to make their way into the online version (rich content area ready to be tapped into)
• Millions of former users don't need to be sold on the concept and can get up and running if they find their way to EA-Land.
• Predominately female demographic of the original game represents a key market focus group as yet unavailable to most virtual worlds and MMOs, which could attract investors, corporate participation and use
• Some game functions existed in the older version, so there's a promise they still might exist (though poor from what I heard. Still, they could represent an activity function lacking in many social worlds, though they should be improved/expanded upon - especially if more EA titles are brought into the mix.)
• 2d/3d diametric graphic display works wonderfully for many popular children's virtual worlds and is a natural bridge to adoption
• Display requirements a lot less than other virtual worlds (I can really see EA-Land translating well for mobile use say and with mobile use projected to increase, this could be a key factor)
• Censorship - given user content oversight, a much "safer" environment potentially than other virtual worlds
• Facebook/Social Web tie-ins (Nice! Very good idea, IMHO and one of the best features).

Cons

• Product recognition - Can former users of TSO especially, but anyone, trust that EA can deliver the goods to be worthy of the time and emotional investment to get involved in personal space and avatars in EA-Land when they failed the first time?
• Is abandoning The Sims name in re-dubbing the offering going to make it harder for current and former The Sims aficionados to find or realize that it exists?
  
• In some ways, Maxis/EA are their own competitors. The Sims 2 has probably wooed many away from the original The Sims and adopters of Sims 2 aren't necessarily going to like the function and environment of EA-Land, which is essentially more like the original.
• If there's no tie-in between online and installed products, success of one will have less impact on the other. (As far as I know, there are no plans to say offer unique "goodies" for online use from purchasing installed expansions nor any mechanism to bring installed users gracefully into the online fold. If this continues, I see this as a lost opportunity).
• Just because there are thousands and thousands of mods online for The Sims doesn't mean the creators of that content will ever bother to have it offered for EA-Land. Many will likely have gotten bored with the Sims concept and moved onto other games, or will have adopted successors like Sims 2, or even Second Life, or some other virtual world, and enjoy more making objects for those spaces instead. This would lessen the resource potential for fast object growth from users to enrich the experience.
• Demographic target still seems to be adults. Realizing that the virtual world market has changed and focusing on young teens might see better results.
  
• Activity space still an unknown; original game did not translate well to multiplayer (Prior versions obviously failed to inspire people to stay with TSO. Will there even be any attempt at gaming functions within EA-Land?)
• Graphic display dated, lacking the panache of many competitors (but this could actually be a plus if EA intends to target a younger demographic used to a similar display format)
• Censorship (it imposes overhead on the part of the space owner and it could turn people away Eg. Branded objects are highly desirable to create a realistic living space since they populate real homes and lives: Coca-Cola, Apple, Mercedes). But when "officially" reviewed and approved, they present copyright problems. Censored worlds will probably decline to see these uploaded, which can lead to some dissatisfaction perceiving a lack user control I'm not saying it's right but it is reality. In fact, I read an article that suggested that such "pirated" virtual goods actually helped promote brand recognition and were still a positive force for the brand owner).
• Censorship will also turn away adult users unless some form of zoning or demarcation (combat zones, etc) is provided for, which doesn't sound like will be the case.

So can they make a go of it? Can a dead horse be flogged to life? (/shrug)

You tell me.

Newbie ponders what "there" is of IBM's and Cisco's Second Lives

Computerworld writer Gary Anthes was tasked to do a piece on Second Life, which, after spending nearly a week of his time within the simulation, he titled Second Life: Is There Any There There?

Within this piece, he is somewhat critical of the corporate presence within Second Life, having had a rather empty and underwhelming experience at the islands built by IBM and Cisco.

"Knowing my editor would ask me about practical IT applications, I sought out a virtual island owned by IBM. To get an idea of how exciting this place is, imagine a 1950s-era IBMer in a starched white shirt and tie with a "THINK" sign hanging on his wall."

Part of his frustration was his failure to find any company representatives to talk to about goods and services, or to just answer questions.

"I returned to IBM's main island determined to find an IBMer who could answer some questions. I didn't find such a person, but I had a long chat with a well-dressed wolf who said he was from FurNation. He said he was only there to use the public "sandbox," which is provided by IBM, to build things."

And failing that, finding any person was a welcome respite and at least a chance to ask some questions.

"I told him I was trying to find out if companies in SL made any money. Virtual companies make real money, he said, 'selling furry avatars, sexual bits, weapons and the like,' while real companies like IBM only advertise and recruit. The wolf was not applying for a job at IBM, it seemed, but he thanked IBM for providing the sandbox."

And of course, all of this begged the question of what function did all this corporate presence provide?

"Still fretting about bandwidth, I traveled next to the Cisco Virtual Campus and walked into the Cisco Training Center. A sign indicated that it was for use only by Cisco partners and employees, which raises the question of why it's on the public Internet and not on a Cisco intranet.

In any case, I found neither partners nor employees in any of the training rooms, and no books, computers or training materials of any kind. Never had it seemed so reasonable to ask if there really was a there there."

Though he did have a relatively better experience at Sears, the author I take it was not impressed with corporate presence within Second Life, or that much with Second Life itself for that matter. Some of his advice:

"Each major company location in SL should be staffed with a real person, at least during business hours. If some friendly and attractive avatar at the Cisco center had approached me and said, "Yes, sir, how may I help you?" and then had given me useful answers to my typed in questions about training, employment opportunities or products, I would have fallen out of my chair with amazement and delight."

So what do I make of this? I'm not sure where the subjective "attractive need play into this. Well-groomed would do for me. Otherwise, I think it's a good piece. And it's original. As far as negative criticism goes, it's not some regurgitated bit of anti-hype backlash. Nor is it a piece written to reclaim credibility damaged by over-reaching optimism by riding the pendulum swing going the other way. I wouldn't even argue that it's all that negative. I don't think this writer had any axes to grind. I think he came to the assignment with a fairly neutral standpoint. What Anthes is describing here is a very typical regrettable newbie experience. (And it probably didn't help his experience that some web links were broken).

If you read the full piece, you see that he spends at least two days of his assignment just trying to learn his way through the interface and figure out how to find places. Out of desperation, and having wasted time through misunderstanding and bad advice from another confused newbie, he buys a book. Now, if he had me to help him out, I could have handed him a Notecard with some landmarks to visit later, maybe even checking out a couple places with him. I could have taken him to New Dove and New Citizens Incorporated (NCI) to get him started on his own look and get him hooked up with help resources, even classes if he was interested.

But Anthes didn't have me there to help him, did he. He, like most newbies, was left stranded in an empty virtual landscape having to rely on people just as new, confused, and ultimately as bored and frustrated as he came to be. Experiences like his are one of the reasons that though Second Life can claim millions of registrations, they can only muster an active user population of 30,000 - 55,000 on most days. People try it, go "huh?" and leave, never to come back.

In fact, I was one of those. When I first went to a meeting showcasing Second Life for uses at work, I dutifully created an account; I logged in; I then had my "Huh?" moment. I forced myself go through orientation and get onto the mainland. But my experience only degraded the more time I was there. Totally underwhelmed by the perceived function , the lag and abysmal graphic quality, I thought, "Are people serious? Someone has got to be kidding me, right? This is lame. This is a total waste of time." And I left, never to come back, or so I thought. Had it not been for an overdue promise to visit a co-worker's build in Second Life, I would never have given it another look. And the virtual light bulb above my head would have never gone on.


Truths out of the mouths of newbies

Yes, having a real person staffed in Second Life is a big overhead for a company. Server space (aka "land") is not cheap, let's face it. Tack on some employee cost tasked against really no revenue for most Second Life corporate uses, and how does one justify that on the books?

Well, I would ask, how much is your company image worth? Do you want to build a presence, which I presume has some underlying marketing potential, and then leave it to a a visiting anthropomorphic wolf or rabbit with no company affiliation to explain your presence for you? Even if you have staff in simulation, not being able to find them is just as bad. In a large build, teleport signs can be your friend, and the friend to visitors.

I wouldn't expect my local GAP store, even if they could lock down the goods, to just leave their store abandoned, hoping that I'll come in to admire the goods but not having anyone to talk to, and expect me to still walk away with my questions answered, a good feeling about GAP, or likely to buy something. The GAP doesn't have a virtual store that I know of, but if they did, I would ask: why treat a virtual space any differently? Insofar as how a person (and the force driving that avatar, at least for now, is a real human being) is going to react to your company, a virtual space can have the same impact, good or bad, as a real building. That's why companies staff people to help greet and guide visitors in real world lobbies.

If you have goods or services to sell, jobs to offer, information to give out, have someone there to do it for you that speaks for you and has your interest in mind. If you have a virtual space that you are using for a corporate function, do what you would for a real building when not in use - lock the doors (or in Second Life parlance, just restrict access). In the former, you're going to improve experience and maybe actually drive some use and results; in the latter, the lock will probably give the impression the space is important and actually sees use. In most corporate builds, I suspect that the space probably isn't and doesn't but they don't have to know that. Perception is everything.

Doppelganger cleverly controls perception by use of space in vSide, making it appear larger then it really is. In fact, restricting the overall space has the positive benefit of channeling people into the same area, giving the perception of popularity and a crowd, even with a small number of users. Let's face it, we're social animals and many people feel more comfortable in a crowd, even a virtual one. People imply popularity, that you're in the "right" place, and that there's something engaging to do there. Effective virtual builds, like real world buildings, are probably going to need to adopt architectural solutions for crowd management, but at least for Second Life, factoring in the ability to fly.

Nothing is more lonely or gives a sense of a places unpopularity in Second Life like coming into it and seeing that there's only one green dot on your mini-map - and it's you. Now maybe you are visitor number 2,001 that day and you just happened to come at a time when no one else was there. But you don't know that. Unlike web pages, we can see who's visiting at the same time we are. And it doesn't matter how many people were already there or who will come back later. If you're a newbie, you probably got the impression that the space is unpopular, and that feeling maybe carries over to the brand behind it, like there's something wrong with it maybe?

When Electric Sheep opened the Virtual CSI:NY presence in Second Life, I first peeked in after the show just to see what's what and to try out the OnRez viewer to see how different it was. Well, it was crowded, with a bunch of lost newbies who were tripping over their own interfaces. There was a clever use of audio media and a HUD to explain the CSI game. But the game wasn't the problem. It was Second Life. Even more sad was a veteran SL user who popped in to see and who was valiently trying to explain the interface. She didn't realize that all these newbies were using a different world viewer, the OnRez viewer provided by Electric Sheep, where buttons and functions could be in different places than the Second Life viewer provided by Linden Lab. I could just see the thought bubbles going up all around me: "Huh?" <-- brought back memories; "I don't get it"; "I'm so confused"; "How do I get my clothes back on?"; "This is silly." I tried to do my part and both help guide the newbies by giving them links to helpful places like NCI and New Dove, as well as help flag the veteran Second Lifer that there was a new viewer, hence the mismatch between what she was trying to explain and the reality in place. Well, after such a fiasco, you'd expect to come back to Virtual CSI:NY and expect to see few or fewer dots. But such is not the case when I've peeked back in. Why? I can't be certain but one of the things that I noticed was that there was a staffer, I presume from Electric Sheep (maybe CBS) to greet, answer questions, and help new users get started in the entry zone. Wander farther into the simulation, what does one find but more helpers. And those little green dots on the mini-map? There seem to be quite a few of them, all congregated in various spots. Just in case this was an aberration, I checked back a couple more time and the dots at a glance, seemed about the same. I don't know how profitable Virtual CSI:NY is given all that manpower investment, but I'd have to say in Second Life terms, it's popular. Green dots it seems have a way of attracting more green dots.


I know the avatar I'm talking to isn't real. But is she real?

Presence can be costly. It's a lot of overhead to consider. And one has to figure that the virtual world never sleeps. Logging into Second Life at different times, it takes on a European, Australian, or Asian tone. Companies have to figure that a visitor might pop in at any time.

Which is why AI avatar "bots" are being developed that can take on that overhead instead of having a real person. They work quite cheap - free in fact beyond their build cost and they don't take breaks. The initial ones are likely going to be fairly simple responders but there are rumblings of some very savvy ones (see Artificial Intelligence Applications in 3d Virtual Worlds) that can do a credible job of mimicking the responses of a real person.

This of course undercuts one of the basic presumptions of virtual worlds, that an avatar represents a real person. One of the interesting aspects of virtual worlds and MMOs is that people tend to treat an avatar at face value, as if they were what they appeared to be. If that avatar appears to be a human man or woman, you, as a virtual world user, would probably respond accordingly. This probably belongs in its own post, but imagine a virtual world where someone can seed avatars to make a space seem more popular as if other people really found it engaging, making you think twice about stopping to take a look around at the offers. Or that person chatting you up and that seems so interested in your latest real world shopping adventure could be a bot mining you for buying trends. Or your new "friend,", taking advantage of how viral marketing works, just swears by Eau'dee'doh perfume or MuskOxen deodorant.

Let's forget about the ethics of AI bots for the moment. Until such bots are available to help "staff" virtual builds, companies who are going to spend a lot of money and time investing in virtual worlds need to consider the whole experience if they want to make it a success, imho. That means considering staffing such builds as if they were real locations, at least to the point of offering someone to help answer questions and take down contacts. I pity the poor person stuck in an empty Second Life island all day but hopefully such exposure will help that person suggest ways to bring traffic and make the spot a purposeful destination point with the intention of conducting business or inquiry of some sort.

Otherwise, just hope that the visiting furry using your sandbox is polite and friendly (I have to say, they often are) while she tries to answer people's questions. I'll conclude with the rest of Anthes' advice:

"Yes, I know that would cost serious bucks. One or more real people would have to be paid real dollars to do that. But if a company can't make its virtual experience substantially better -- and I mean really head-and-shoulders better -- than its existing Web capabilities, it might as well not bother.

Because my wolf friend isn't going to buy an IBM computer because he spotted it through the window while playing in the IBM sandbox. The IBM island must be a destination deliberately sought out by people with an interest in IBM, with the knowledge that they will have a really cool virtual experience there while being treated like a real human by a real human."

Virtual druthers: social union of games and Web

This is the second part of a three-part post that examines potential aspects of a future Virtual Web experience. Part 2: Virtual druthers: social union of games and Web discusses asset management, sourcing and standards, and offers a list of 15 salient aspects and why I feel each is something to be considered for a successful offering. Part 1: Reshaping the ego for the Virtual Web makes the case for the essentials of self and a review of the current phenomena of the Social Web to conjecture what might take shape and work well in any virtual successor. Part 3: Virtual contenders is a list of some of the major virtual words, current and future, and how I feel they stack up against the former arguments.

Notions for a Virtual Web

What makes for an ideal virtual web? I think whether there will even be a sole Virtual Web near future or ever is debatable. Certainly virtual worlds have really captured the imagination and press recently. But if product history for web clients hold true, it is more likely at this state that a number of virtual worlds will come to market and co-exist, carving out various niches in their activity zones with committed clientele. But I couldn't help thinking about what aspects might take shape in such a phenomena as would constitute the Virtual Web. We are standing at a very exciting time, near to the big bang of explosive virtual growth. Even if several worlds ultimately evolve to co-exist, I think there will always be a push to bring them together into a comprehensive or mutually intelligible format. For that reason, I think that a lot of people are thinking about the potential Virtual Web, seeing in the manifest crop of current simulations the promise of the most significant change to potentially impact social networking since the onset of the Web itself.

It is not hard to begin a feature list of something that is itself an extension, abstraction and recreation of an existing highly successful system. The current Web offers us proven qualities that recommend themselves by default: open distribution, platform independence, open source structure and maintenance, extendibility, indexing, interaction, anonymity, customization, security (relative), persistence, lack of censorship (relative), and free access.

I would argue that each of these aspects has led to the success of the Web and has made the Web as much a mainstay of social interaction and commerce as has the telephone for some, a growth pattern that will only continue. Yet, as we shall see in Part 3, most, if not all, of the offerings examined will be seen to have departed in one or more significant points from the model offered by the existing Web. Even if one does not accept the points model as I've presented it as being the most accurate rendition, there is still clearly a strong deviation in those simulations that preclude them from being a satisfactory extension of the Web experience in virtual form. If one accepts that these aforementioned qualities are proven, why would anyone consider deviating from them as a baseline moving forward to a new form? - Well, I have come to believe that such is the wrong question to ask.

Though there are some few virtual world products that have either aspirations or at least some small hope of their virtual world being the basis of the next Web, for the most, there seems to be no attempt to recreate or to capture the Web experience. What we are seeing in this rush to market is not the competition to recreate the success of the Web, but to stake out a market share in the virtual world collective medium. If such virtual colonies are successful, I believe that the thinking is probably that expansion can come thereafter. But for the time being, it is such a new medium, that exploration, exploitation, and engagement are the most important factors.

So the question, imho, should be not which virtual world could be the basis of a future Virtual Web, but how might a Virtual Web evolve from such competing closed systems? And then how might successful aspects of these spaces fold over into a more communal offering, preparing and raising expectations in terms of behaviors, access, persistence, and use?

I have posed that the existing Social Web can provide a clear roadmap to successful interaction on some levels and should factor in the overall goals for any standards body or intelligent vendor. But there are those aspects of the virtual experience that not only recommend themselves, they are germane to why virtualization is so much more engaging for some than the existing Web. If a Virtual Web is to come about, these newer features, some possibly that have yet to be discovered or displayed, will likely suggest themselves from the most successful of the virtual worlds that will thrive and prosper over their counterparts. To try and predict, plan and be prepared, to react to such a manifestation, I suggest it is best to start thinking outside of the box that is the web browser. Consider that a common yet mistaken assumption that all such virtual worlds are "games" still realizes a fundamental truth: that the other parent model to study is that of social gaming.

Collectively, social games are the most popular form of virtual world currently in existence. The most successful of these, in terms of revenue and active use, are fully realized three-dimensional spaces known as MMOs (MMO comes from Massive Multiplayer Online). In MMOs the game activity is paramount, but most offer varying levels of social activity as a by-product, often unplanned. These games offer us another model that deals with visual and aural manifestation: three-dimensional space, avatars, interactive physics (between avatars and the avatars and environment), inventory (items carried by and used by the avatar), group association and organization, avatar and group communication, persistence of space, both ambient and reactive sound and music, game engines and graphics rendering, and, for some, personal space and/or the customization of space and avatar.

Clearly, in trying to reimagine the Web into a visual format, we have clear working examples. Though such games might be proprietary, they still offer excellent proofs-of-concept. And since we have a large number of working examples, a list that compounds each quarter, a qualitative assessment can be done to decide on what features of each work best, which don't, and which ultimately might suggest themselves to a comprehensive solution that seeks to bridge the visual and interactive environment of social games to the broader use of the Social Web.

Mixing the models

The Web is mostly open, interlinked. It has evolved to include mechanisms and standards so that it can be managed, adapted, and transformed by the uses put to it. Growth is organic and ongoing. The Web is accessible on most levels by nearly all computers. MMOs are exclusive, closed systems. They are software applications where change must be managed, and with more limited resources, requirements assessed against many demands: user satisfaction, technology changes, time to market, and competing products' features. Growth is therefore more structured and scheduled. Because of their technology requirements, MMOs cater to select target markets, some more exclusive than others. Not everyone has satisfactory access.

So if we wish combine the extendibility, user control, and open standards of the Web with the sensory richness and sophistication of the MMOs, how might such an experience come to be, given the different requirements of each?

Probably the biggest hurdle in visualizing such a system are the requirements put forth by graphics rendering and scripted interaction. As we shall see in Part 3, most vendors choose to accommodate these by controlling the number of choices, essentially using MMOs' concepts of fixed asset libraries and animation rethought of in non-game terms, or supra-game terms when considering hybrid models. These work because these are closed systems, with all that such entails. Second Life is currently the only virtual world to offer the ability for users to interject their own creations into the environment (HiPiHi has stated its intention to offer same). There is only a limited fixed library. But though these user-created objects are not the sole cause of performance problems, they are a contributing factor and Second Life suffers for it. Second Life has much poorer performance and currently no ability to scale well for users in any numbers in a given area. Though an outdated graphics engine is partly to blame, one can see where bloated scripts and excessively complex object models can slow rendering to a crawl or even crash the server, harking back to when bloated nested tables and excessive JavaScript could slow the rendering of web pages in the early Web.

Any solution for a Virtual Web that presupposes both state of the art graphics and extensibility, if both parent models are valid conceptual ancestors, must need have the ability to at least offer the option for a rich immersive experience, and yet have the ability to allow for user-created objects and spaces as part of its makeup - and both with an acceptable level of performance. The solution I propose is to to apply an adaptive model that borrows from each parent. It is not necessarily the most likely model. I see several ways this might come about. It is simply a hypothesis that I find attractive.

First need is that a common baseline set of standards, which would govern not only behaviors, but script, visuals, rendering engines requirements, and a visual reference language, would need to be monitored and maintained by an open standards body, much as HTML/XML are by the W3C and JavaScript is by the ECMA. Such a body would provide a neutral platform for change and it is a proven concept already in use. A Virtual Web browser would need to include a graphics engine, like games do. The graphics engine might change over time, or different vendors might prefer different versions of it in their own products, but as long as the requirements are set for in open standards, everyone knows the minimum requirements that will be tasked to any such engine.

To achieve efficient quality, I suggest the solution also needs to follow one of two tracks: the markup model or the library model.

The markup model is an exception to my argument as it excludes the game ancestor and reimagines virtuality based on a markup language, something akin to VRML (virtual reality markup language), X3D, or a scripting language, like ActionScript. This would be rendered in a web browser using a plug-in and would be akin to a more robust version of the Shockwave/Flash player. There is much that is very attractive about this. One of the biggest virtual worlds existing is based on Shockwave technology. It is a closed system but it is not hard to imagine a similar product that is open to user generated content based on a rendered language. The overhead of such would be a lot less than managing user created objects amalgamated through scripts and graphic textures of various file sizes. And objects could be linked rather than uploaded. Though existing Shockwave virtual worlds have a rather cartoony look one often sees in vectored animation, that is more typical of their market (mostly teens and children) than an indication of the limits of the technology. Even if Shockwave is not the channel for this sort of effort, one can imagine something similar coming to market. And though I see much promise in this avenue of approach, the current crop seems more focused on game-like offerings which use or seem to use embedded library objects.

The library model would borrow from the methods used by games. Games achieve much of their performance by maintaining almost all of the objects, textures, and sound that comprise the visual elements on the host system, either directly on a drive or kept on a CD or DVD, to be accessed as needed. For MMO games, the game engine needs to then rerender the scene based not only on the actions of the local player, but on the actions of those around the player as well as the game AI, all transmitted via network connections. But having the bulkiest files kept locally in asset libraries means that the amount of information that need be passed through the network pipeline would be much smaller, and the time to render much faster, than it would be had everything needed to be downloaded.

Static local libraries vs dynamic linked rendering

For the library model to achieve customizable quality, we need to find a correlation that equates media elements to both HTML and XML, and that makes use of the built-in understanding of the former, along with the extensible open-ended application of the latter. HTML is preconfigured to render in such a way because it is governed by a standards body. Anyone seeking to build a browser, be it Explorer, Firefox, Opera or Safari, knows how to build their application to render the markup correctly because these standards are open and available. Hence the "understanding" for HTML is built into browsers, and even though they include references to conforming DTDs, such are not utilized for the sake of performance and speed. There's no need to when expectations have already been set.

If builders of virtual worlds know which visual and media elements have been downloaded to any user's computer via the browser, they can use such knowledge to craft their worlds. Virtual world builders would have a hopefully large and updated library of assets they know they could call upon, at minimal impact to bandwidth. So, for the sake of virtual argument, if one takes the preconfigured asset library of a game as potentially being the same as a virtual HTML, assets hosted not on the collective Web to be downloaded and rendered dynamically, but on the host systems as part of the "browser" installation, then one understands the correlation between the two models. This creates for a very rich experience, providing visual, aural, and scripted building blocks which are then reconfigured according to instructions coming in via the Web. Everyone experiences them the same because they are the same on everyone's system.

Therefore, the default or baseline Virtual Web, like a closed game system, will have a finite number of choices available. And like a closed system that seeks to keep its users engaged, textures, objects, scripts might be corrected, modified, replaced over time, and the choices extended with care. Stored assets would obviously be faster to load. But how to expand the experience to be open-ended? Two ways: optional library downloads and linked dynamic objects. These would be akin to our visual XML. The former might even have conformance instructions, like DTDs or Schema. The latter would be self-describing. For this hypothesis, assume that all objects, standard or optional, library or dynamic, have a fixed reference number to call upon.

Optional library downloads would be like the initial library installed as part of the viewer, added to the local asset files to be potentially called upon by builders, using provided documentation indicating reference calls. Such stored assets could be based on themes or uses. They could be provided by the standards body as optional files to help extend the experience of the Virtizen, or could be offered as part of product promotions or activity vendors, such as game providers who want to ensure a specific graphical look or style to their activity zone. To keep file size down, the challenge for library extensions would be to not recreate objects and textures already installed as part of another library but only include those aspects different from the baseline, including ones that might be imagined to be better. For "open" extended libraries, anyone could use the assets in their building calls, and the call details would be provided in library documentation. But some vendors might also offer "closed" libraries, where the assets are provided for download for efficiency, but which could only be used in specific contexts - say on a specific server.

Much like current Web users are sometimes prompted to download a specific font, sound file, or browser plug-in, to optimize their Web surfing experience on a specific site, users entering into activity zones that required new library assets would be notified and asked if they cared to download them. Opting out would force the objects to render to a baseline texture provided in the default library, or render certain scripted objects inoperable. Breaking libraries into specific families of use or themes would help keep the initial browser download smaller and ensure that virtizens only downloaded files that they actively needed to by way of their own use activities. And the impact of exploration could be spread out over more time. Virtizens content with the experience in the main entry zone would never need download anything further except for those files provided as updates or extensions as part of browser upgrades based on new standards. And, as standards updated and older textures and scripts were replaced or embellished by newer offerings, one could see that the more useful and popular public domain open library assets might be added to the official libraries as part of standards maintenance. Optional library sets maintained by the standards body could include highly complex and useful common objects: vehicles, avatar hair, plants and rocks, scripted animals, or theme libraries, such as science fiction, Renaissance, Moghul India, etc. Where optional libraries included the same optional elements, including more than one library would only update the object or item in question if it was older.

Not all objects would recommend themselves as candidates for installation into the local library assets. This might be because the creator did not wish the item to be installed on someone else's computer. But most of the time, user creations would not suggest themselves for such because, not coming from a "trusted" source such as a standards body or activity zone vendor, or because they are limited to only a few files, they are just not candidates for such. And in those instances, objects would be rendered dynamically, based on instructions carried by the object itself when downloaded from the objects' or owners' servers. Such objects would render somewhat slower since the information for their construction, including all baseline textures and scripts, would need to be downloaded to memory and/or cache and then rendered, much like what is currently done in Second Life. The difference between this solution and Second Life's is hopefully that by sharing the load between stored and downloaded files, with the understanding that hopefully the most graphically intensive and complex are likely to be local, helps create a more efficient render and allow for richer objects than one currently has in Second Life.

Typical dynamic objects would likely relate to avatar embellishment: clothes, hair, skins, vehicles, etc. Probably avatar or other dynamic objects acquired would include a local download copy so one can see one's own avatar render as quickly as possible. The "browser" would first check to see if the dynamic object had a local copy kept in the asset library and if it did not find such, would then proceed to follow the rendering instructions. Dynamic objects would be self-describing, carrying their own scripts, textures, and rendering instructions as part of their object package. Dynamic object creators, for the most part, would probably like to see their objects added to local libraries, not to use per se, but at least to speed up viewing. With a hopefully good metadata system in place, users might be able to right-click/ctrl-click an appealing object and download its makeup to the local library so that it rendered faster, and as well find out how to secure their own copy, if such options were possible. (I suspect though that given the desire for unique appearance, that there should be a user option to not let others view avatar or owned-object details). The most popular objects might even make their way into asset libraries at some points.

World builders or virtual site builders would not be limited to using the static library elements, but rendering efficiency, like like in the current Web, would put pressure on builders to use methods that ensured a satisfactory visit or be willing, to put up with smaller crowds. But just like when creating complex scripting or heavy structuring in the current Web, the choice is always up to the user.

Of course, packaging efficiency, graphics processing power, and transmission speeds might someday soon render such methods obsolete, in which case all objects could be rendered dynamically, just as they are in Second Life. As equipment improves and bandwidth becomes less of an issue, asset libraries could be removed over time. But until that day, in the quest to serve as many users, the final trait inherited from the games parent for this mixed model would be a graceful de-evolution of graphics intensity, so that users not blessed with cutting-edge systems could still make use and function within the Virtual Web. Either textures could be provided in differing levels of quality, such as base, midline or high. Or the graphics processor could be set to have different levels of graphics rendering, allowing for the most pleasurable experience at the cost of processing power or functional pleasing use for most systems.

Protocols and growth

Finally, we're back to the Web ancestor. How to manage an interlinked distributed system of virtual sites like the Web? Though the application I'm sure is complex, the answer is simple: grow the Web. Virtual worlds would just be another type of access point and in the spirit of convergence, having a Virtual Web browser being the same application as a Web 2.0 browser makes sense, especially given tabbed browsing now available in nearly every Web browser. The Virtual World just becomes another layer of interaction in the existing Web, not a replacement as some have posed.

What would be needed is a protocol to take the stateless experience of HTTP to a new method of bidirectional stateful communication. One's browser isn't simply a passive recipient, it actively injects you - all right, the collection of dynamic objects that constitute your avatar - into a distant server and you are able to function and effect that space just as it and other visitors effects your alter-ego.

And yet, that same protocol might give you access to sensitive personal information retained in your browser, but not allow access to same by the owners of the server you are visiting until you actively choose to offer such to enable transactions.

I cannot speak to the state of stateful Web services, but essentially that is what is required. I know that WebSphere, among others, are working on stateful applications. One can see that one of the keen benefits of a Virtual Web, as opposed to the feudal baronies of closed competing virtual fiefs, is all the rampant growth in infrastructure that a Virtual Web would create were it to take off as projected. I suspect that existing protocols wouldn't allow for a lot of avatar/packet injection resulting in a somewhat low user ceiling, ala Second Life. But that would change in time and demands for more powerful servers and new software to host and manage traffic would ramp up. Businesses poised to sell servers, software, and routers could really see a long-term windfall that would spill over to other support industries as the means to populate this new endless Virtual Web created new job opportunities.

None of this would happen to anything like the same degree if the virtual world collective remains disjointed and disconnected. That I think is both the challenge and incentive to realizing a universal Virtual Web.

Druthers in 15 points

Combining the arguments for ego, asset management, standards and extendability, my ideal for the Virtual Web would address the following points in its construction:

1. It must be distributed, allowing one's avatar to move from server to server and yet retain basic visual and functional integrity. (a)

2. It should either allow for multiple avatars or an infinitely malleable avatar whose visible identity is distinct from an absolute verification identity. (b)

3. It must be platform independent.

4. It must be based on an open-sourced, scalable, and extendable language and asset library, such as a series of common media libraries (that are download with all viewers) and user-defined (optional download or linked) media libraries. (c)

5. It must allow users to upload their own content and define their own activities and own their own creations.

6. There must be a way for all activities and content to be typed with metadata to let search and indexing function properly. (d)

7. Though governed by standards designed to regulate its structure so that everyone has a common reference when building (like the W3 to HTML or ECMA to JavaScript) – it must be unregulated in terms of content – leaving regulation to the users and to governments to enforce.

8. It must be fully linkable with existing web-based content and existing technologies, being able to direct traffic and information to web sites and web services and vice versa; as well being able to embed web-based and media content where it makes sense to do so.

9. It must integrate high-quality multi-channel voice client, allowing people to communicate in teams or groups (useful for business and games).

10. The social space should act as an umbrella through which one enters into business, activity, and educational spaces. The social space must remain distinct but linked, so that avatars can move back and forth, from activity to activity, using the social space as the bridge. (e)

11. Activity spaces should be "zoned" or demarcated in some fashion to help indexing, search, and access (or avoidance, for areas inappropriate or offensive) to certain users of the social space (e.g. children). (f)

12. There should be social controls should that extend down to the user level. (g)

13. It must be secure.

14. It must persist.

15. It must be free of cost (h)

(a) This to allow for the full growth of the system and also the ability to host one's own offering and yet have it tied into the "grid." And in this way, market forces would come to bear, allowing for cheaper alternatives and richer experiences. Some systems might require avatar changes and restrictions based on themes, for example a fantasy game space like World of Warcraft, should it be linked – but the avatar should retain it's basic form preferences and revert upon leaving that kind of space back into the common social area. One should not discount the appeal of avatar persistence and embellishment as a form of ego extension.

(b) In the former case, I suggest an unlimited amount, but that there should be a fee (nominal but enough to discourage willy-nilly avatar escalation ($15 U.S?)). Validation, though sub-surface respective to appearance, allows anyone's avatar access to methods for payment or access confirmation when needed. Yes, people can just change their avatar at will but not always their avatar name. OR – make the exposed name itself malleable to allow for those people who want to disappear into the virtual throng without being recognized. Then no need for multiple avatars (again, "true" identity being linked to the hidden validation mechanisms). Any system really needs to account for somewhat diametrically opposed needs and function of avatars: ones that require anonymity and permutation, and ones that require authentication and fixed identity link. If we disconnect the displayed name and appearance from the latter, then we can have both. – I cannot overstate this strongly enough, part of the strength and appeal of these environments is the ability to level the social field of perception and allow everyone the ability to either appear as they wish to, regardless of social, ethnic, class, gender, wealth, religious, orientation, cultural or other conventions.

(c) Common libraries installed on system as part of the application viewer will help efficiency, reduce load times, reduce bandwidth usage, help offer high-quality graphical objects for free to help encourage building and use and help maintain the appeal of the space. This is basically taking the idea of common tagging and extending it to graphical and scripting elements. A common library lets users build say a brick edifice and have comfort in knowing that it will appear as intended. One possible use for this user-defined libraries would be to let vendors who are selling a certain "look" for avatars to use in their proprietary space have access to those textures and media files only within and while the avatar is in the vendor activity area. Avatars leaving that area, if they lack the vendor's permissions to retain the look or objects, would have such become inoperable and textures would render to a default common value or the avatar would need to "change clothes" so to speak. Like any media files, library elements could be linked for download to user system (faster loading) vs linked to load off of owners' servers (helping guard ownership and restrict unauthorized reuse). Activity vendors might also use avatar embellishment as a marketing tool to encourage subscription, such as the ability to show off a hard-won item used for the activity in the social space. ("were u git kewl rabit ears?") - Another option, is as stated, to use markup solely for rendering. But I think markup married to embedded graphical elements still allows for the best experience.

(d) Such typing should be encouraged, though users will learn this necessity themselves once better search methods come to being. This is key since objects and services are unlimited.

(e) Though social spaces are just their own activity zone, and though there should be an option to enter from a "homepage" like the Web, offering a one or more likely several communal entry points helps bring a focus and discovery point for new objects. I suspect that should such a proposed Virtual Web come about, one good way to think of this is to realize search sites like Google and Yahoo as social zones. There might be many and we'd each not have the same ones, but each would provide ready access to new features. Probably many spaces might try to attract people to "home" there and therefore be exposed to other host branded offerings on the way to doing whatever one does in virtual worlds. And I think one way to help this is to require that avatar's be "homed" somewhere - be it communal social spaces hosted by the standards body or search engines (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft), private offers that include advertising and access to fun activites (Games for Windows, Sony Home, AWOMO, Gamespot), personal worlds hosted on a home server, or even corporate or information sites (Apple, IBM, Guardian Unlimited, NY Times).

Keeping social space and its economy in real dollars distinct from activity spaces insulates the social/business space from the effects of "gold farming" and other manipulative techniques already affecting game economies. It also protects vendors doing business from dealing with inflation or devaluation of the game currency when trying to convert back to real dollars. IF game vendors want to link their game economies directly with the overall space, they will have to be the ones who pay for money taken from game to social space and account for such in their subscription fees. A good working example of games sitting within or under the social framework can be found in Second Life's Dark Life game – where "gold pieces" the game currency are tracked by the HUD given to control the game and in no way are translatable to objects or services outside the game. In other words, one cannot take gold and purchase anything outside of the game. Gold remains strictly to buy items in the game. Conversely, one cannot take Linden dollars and buy game objects – one needs gold for that. However, there is nothing to prevent people from making side deals to sell game items for minimal gold in return for a side transaction of Linden dollars, or to just sell gold themselves, all to help elevate one's game avatar abilities faster than the game designers probably would wish. But this is just the same as the issue of real money being used to purchase game items in online games, like World of Warcraft, which his the basis of the "gold farming" service industry. I suggest that game designers either decide to get into that business, as Sony did for EverQuest, make items non-transferable, instill a game tax for in-game transactions, or some other such controls.

(f) A way to enforce this "zoning" through a common media library (point 11) is to always require a "safe" baseline texture for any object so that moving back into the social space, certain types of media textures or objects would simply not render in the transition but would be replaced by a default unless the avatar user remembered to adjust. That way, there would be no way for a character to leave a game space (say a Star Wars franchise) wearing their game kit if the game vendors did not want that stuff used outside the space (or perhaps required for a separate purchase) or say, if an avatar left an adult-zoned area, there would be no danger of offensive avatar embellishments being exposed after the avatar reset to baseline (Again, all custom or user-defined textures would require or come with a default common texture, certain objects would just disappear). Also, zoning, in combination with some sort of verification, could be used to keep children out of adult-only areas and vice versa.

(g) And by inference to any and all avatar permutations. I think, borrowing from game conventions, the ability to self-edit one's own experience is key to keeping enjoyment level high. Unlike the real world, we do have the ability to filter out unwanted intrusions into our experience and I think an intelligent system should account for such. Say for example, typical of many games, if I see someone spouting nonsense that I find offensive I can simply ignore them. But is that enough? How far should it go? Let's extend that further to be more informative. Say a given decision to ignore someone is temporary and times out but a warning e-mail/IM is fired off to the person letting them know that they had some sort of social filter applied against them. That person can then decide if the action or dialogue that precipitated this is worth the cost of alienation or that the person(s) was just too thin-skinned. Or, a person can even make that ignorance of the other person permanent (reversible of course but only through the application interface). "Property" owners could use such controls to ban or warn persons abusing (in their opinion) their offerings or spaces; such is already is done in Second Life. Such social controls should permeate all the way down to the user level so that a person simply can't fashion a new avatar and then go back to the same venue or activity as if nothing had happened. I think even more powerful would be to turn off collision-detection and visibility for the mutually offended parties, and have any aspect of an unwanted user's avatars made invisible and unable to interact with the banning person or location – basically as if they weren't there. – Though I think there is a highly questionable issue of social sterility to such a solution, it would be a very powerful and appealing tool. The amount of trouble and effort it could save might justify social stagnation. Though my gut-feeling is that maybe to allow for some "in your face" "griefing" as a necessary part of any life, real or virtual. People who do not face such at some point fail to learn to the tools to maturely handle such situations. One of the strengths of virtual worlds, imho, is to be able to interact in a safer environment.

(h) ...for end users.

In the concluding third part to the original post, I will examine a number of current and future virtual worlds, organize them into types, pose them against my arguments, and conjecture what sorts of perceived strengths and weaknesses they offer.

Virtual Worlds: hype or reality for businesses?

To provide a foundation for some recent and forthcoming arguments, I would like to point to Virtual Worlds: hype or reality for businesses?, an 18-minute discussion with three panel experts, hosted by Silicon.com. Imho, this video is bang-on stuff. Anyone with an interest in virtual worlds, Second Life for business, and how this technology might shape in future should take the time to watch it. This panel nails it regarding sideways scalability, the open sourcing of server hosting, dependence and fragility of single source hosting, competition, and lack of objectivity when so much focus and commitment are with one sim. This is so much more intelligent and succinct than all the fluffy hype being blown around the info-winds, imho.

Reshaping the ego for the Virtual Web

This is the first part of a three-part post that examines potential aspects of a future Virtual Web experience. Part 1: Reshaping the ego for the Virtual Web makes the case for the essentials of self and a review of the current phenomena of the Social Web to conjecture what might take shape and work well in any virtual successor. Part 2: Virtual druthers: social union of games and Web discusses asset management and offers final a list of 15 salient aspects and why I feel each is something to be considered for a successful offering. Part 3: Virtual contenders is a list of some of the major virtual words, current and future, and how I feel they stack up against the former arguments.

I think if one were to boil it down to essentials, I would consider the cornerstone features of the existing Social Web to be ego, anonymity, and identification; yes, the last two are contradictory. If correct in this assessment, then many of the current crop of virtual worlds are lacking in one or more aspects.

Ego

Ego or the extension of self, I feel, is the most important consideration. Avatar creation and use as the foundation of the virtual experience is a given. But it seems that some existing purveyors of virtual worlds fail to realize the significance of the avatar, feeling that the function and use of the virtual space is paramount and what engages a user most. Many as well fail to realize that there are other aspects of self beyond the embodiment of an avatar. I think in the years to come, in the process of weeding that will decide which virtual worlds persist and which die, that a failure to engage our egos will be the significant cause of most failures.

Why do I think this? I would ask you, where have many of the recent most popular innovations in the current Web 2.0 changes taken place? Not just in the filtered personalized web experience crafted to our own tastes and needs, but in the expression of a more social Web. One sees this extension of self into the heretofore anonymous Web via mechanisms like blogs, wikis, YouTube, Myspace, Flickr, Facebook. What social experiments like Second Life, and even social games like World of Warcraft or Everquest, show us is that a significant amount of energy, time, and money can and will be expended on the personalization and embellishment of personal projection. When you couple the growth phenomena of the social aspects of the Web conjoined with the energies invested in avatar and personal space embellishment, any solution that ignores the emotional and social appeal of ego extension in virtual realms will fail to engage. Yes, such virtual worlds might be useful; they might allow for activities such as business, games, and education, yet they will fail to register on an emotional level if they lack the ability to project and maintain aspects of self. I pose that any such will fail to become the virtual equivalent of the existing Web.

People might maintain that the cited are merely examples of well-crafted activity spaces. That it is indeed the function or activity of the space that counts most. That is partly correct. As we shall see in Part 3, the lack of engaging activities is another failure of some virtual vendors. If not corrected, any space, virtual or not, that fails to engage enough users to achieve a critical mass to make it stand out amongst its competitors will ultimately fail. And, as shown by the rapidly changing lineup of leaders in the Social Web, users are quite willing and likely to abandon one purveyor for another who does the job better in their eyes. There is no loyalty to an activity. But there is loyalty to one's self and one’s community, including the virtual.

The bulk of people engaged in the spaces that comprise the Social Web and virtual worlds are drawn to the activities that these places provide. When we consider that education, business, and socialization are just activities, as much as any that can take place inside of MMO games, then we can define activity itself as the definition of both the Social Web and virtual space. Success is defined by use and subscription fees and is a result of how well the vendor provided for the needs of the users to participate in the activity. But, once again, there is no loyalty to an activity. As we have seen in chat clients, the ongoing battle between Myspace and Facebook, and with more and more MMO games coming up to challenge the market dominance and revenue of World of Warcraft, that activity itself can be outdone.

The resistance to change for users of such spaces does not come along the merits of activities but on how much of one's personal and perceived social network stays, or migrates to the new space. Consider MMO games, which are more like other virtual worlds; then add in the investment and emotional bond to one’s avatar self – nonexistent for some, but highly important for others. Both of these factors provide a sort of social glue that brings traction to the space, beyond the merits of its activity. Challenging activity spaces must bring either a much better mechanism for the activity function, or offer attractive new features to create a lot of initial interest. Since these spaces are mostly proprietary, there are no guarantees that one's existing social network will also make a conversion and very little likelihood that any avatar investment will survive the transition. And though some users do participate in multiple spaces along the same kind of activity, hoping to preserve as well as adapt, given a finite amount of time, there is usually a favorite that wins out in the end.

These transitions are very expensive. Users are faced with some sacrifice of themselves, either social contacts who are unwilling to migrate, or their own avatar investment. Businesses must constantly try to reshape their offerings to attract or retain users, or ascertain who to partner with. Process improvements are found but the energy expenditure, wasted efforts, and social dissatisfaction that results are the reason why there will be pressure to transform what are likely to be initial virtual world empires into a comprehensive virtual solution akin to the Web.

The single factor most unique to virtual worlds is the abstraction of ego into visible forms. The use of icons in forums and movies on video share sites in the current Social Web is a hint that our desire to present a form to the world at large is ever-most. Virtual world vendors who embrace and understand this need for self expression will have clear advantages over their competitors. They will enjoy a form of associative loyalty possibly, probably I would say, more powerful than the social glue provided by personal networks. Persistence and the time it takes to craft those visible forms of ego create by their very nature an investment in the space. More choices, more variety, implies more time, and hence more association with those forms, with more implied loyalty therefore to the space that houses them. Though activity will be the draw that brings the crowds, it will be the permutations and persistence of ego, as well as social networks, that will help retain them. We have already seen this in current MMO games; there is no reason not to expect the same from other virtual worlds.

When I speak of persistence of ego, I’m actually referring to two abstracts of oneself: space (static) and avatar (dynamic). Personal virtual space, be it a house, a castle, a starship, are analogous to blogs, online photo albums, and Myspace pages. Commercial virtual spaces, stores, kiosks, and vending machines have the same relation to commercial web sites with less of their actual use currently, due to lack of mechanisms and security concerns. So to say that a future virtual world should maintain persistent space is simply to ask one to rethink existing Web spaces in three-dimensional terms. Comparing Web and virtual spaces, each type of presence can have visitors; each demonstrates something about the owner in its design and contents; each can be the instigator of social or business contact and therefore contains the potential to drive interaction or commerce; each seeks to engage. The leap to understanding this concept is not hard to reach. It's only left to ask if the purveyor of the virtual world feels that that a mechanism to offer and maintain personal space is worth the overhead of maintenance and creation. I suggest that they should consider such worthwhile, if any of the success of the Social Web is valid. Where virtual worlds surpass existing Web 2.0 mechanisms is in the level of immersion.

The projection of self into a definable form is new to virtual worlds and does not have a correlation to the existing Web. Heretofore, we interacted directly with the Web via point, click and URL. Now, in virtual terms, we must craft a visible intermediary, an avatar, that represents us. On the one hand, this can be incredibly freeing in that we can rethink ourselves and present ourselves, not as how we might seem, but how we wish to be seen as. The importance of this projection to how others interact with us is not lost on anyone who has spent significant time in a world like Second Life, one that allows for infinite avatar permutation. However, most other worlds, as can be seen in Part 3, offer only limited options when crafting a concept of self. For this reason, though they might succeed on other levels of entertainment, security or ease of use, and might enjoy initial success, they will ultimately be susceptible to being supplanted by a later offering that connects more personally with the user. Furthermore, none of these worlds as yet offers the ability to translate in any way avatar, space, or any form of virtual self-expression over to another offering. They are each closed systems vying for dominance and yet unable or unwilling to register that the ultimate best use, like the current Web, is the ability to interlink and travel everywhere, in a form of one's own choosing.

Anonymity and identification

Virtual worlds present some significant challenges and differences in how we engage each other. Perception is everything, at least at first. Avatars can and will be as like or unlike to ourselves as we wish, limited only to the choices inherent in the creation system offered by the space vendor. Sometimes these choices are only offered at onset upon creation of the avatar, aspects being fixed, partly or in whole, thereafter. In other systems, they are exchangeable at will for any form anytime. A person might be represented as a single avatar or have multiple representations. The summation is that we can never be sure of whom we are dealing with when engaged with another person’s avatar. We can only see them as they wish to be seen, just as they see us for how we wish to be seen, something very new and very powerful for the virtual experience that separates it from other forms of interaction that have come before.

But as freeing as this is to some, it can be extremely frustrating to others. Harping back to that point of being social animals, we have evolved to using the appearance of others to help us understand how to engage each other. It's in the very nature of our personal dealings, whether we understand or acknowledge it or not. Studies have been shown where people tend to react to avatars as if their own avatar and the others were in fact real, using the same visual cues they would have in real life. Aspects of gender, age, attractiveness, height, or weight all carry preconceptions. But there is no guarantee any longer that any such appearances have any true foundation with the person behind the masque. Right or wrong, true or misconceived, many people feel that ethnicity, clothing, hairstyle, expressions and body language might offer them clues to such things as culture, class, nationality, or orientation and might use such clues to govern their interchanges. In the virtual setting, some of these are either missing or boiled down to very limited animations. Just as has often occurred when misreading the intention behind written text, devoid of the body cues that embellished the meaning, there is frustration and apprehension that a misreading will lead to a misunderstanding, or that one is never free to fully express oneself fully given the lack of verification and a potential for deception.

And, aside for some virtual words built around an activity or activity theme, the two most current being social and gaming, where appearance is taken in context, there is a challenge and affront to some when it comes to dealing with the more outrageous or fantastical forms that people choose to adopt. For example, except for worlds such as Club Penguin where such are the norm, some people find that interacting with an animal avatar is just too silly or disconcerting. There might be cultural issues as well. As shown in Mary Chase's play, not everyone has Elwood P. Dowd's capacity to accept and interact with a six-foot tall anthropomorphic rabbit as an equal. Perhaps it is more with the issue of equality when examined in purely social settings – and having fantastic shapes just makes this more apparent. Or perhaps it is or is also the inability to know when to say what that people really have issue with. And in virtual worlds, there is a possibility of encountering many Harveys along the way.

For certain activities, such as business, and for legal considerations in both social and business dealings, anonymity is anathema. At some point, regardless of surface anonymity, there must be a way to effectively engage the real person's identification verification and payment mechanisms to both ensure payment as well as receipt of goods and services. That usually means a name, and address, and other identifiers along the way. And when such transactions fail, to know that there are ramifications and avenues of redress available to users, helps foster economic security. Go-betweens such as PayPal and vendors such as Linden Lab help insulate the identities from the transaction, but for real commerce and use to ensue, no one doubts that there must be a way to effectively engage parties directly.

In other situations, it is equally important to know the true nature of the person behind the avatar. If a virtual world is used as a distance-negating tool for meetings and negotiations, someone who thought he was dealing with an adult for a real world auto sale would be very disconcerted if he were to find out that the adult person he thought he was making a case to was actually a precocious seven year old, wasting his valuable time. Conversely, a young child who found a friend elsewhere in the world to share thoughts and personal confidences with might be shocked, as would their horrified parents, to find out that the child avatar on the other end was in reality an adult pedophile milking the child for information. So used are we to judging people in the context of how they appear, that there is a real danger for misuse beyond the extent of embarrassment.

These are all valid and compelling arguments, along with so many others, for the need for transparency. But there are others just as valid and compelling for the need for anonymity. Anonymity is one of the reasons why the Web and Social Web have seen such success to date. Anonymity allows for safe socialization and exploration. Many women for instance like the safer nature of virtual social interaction in going to new scenes and not having to deal with the repercussions of aggressive or unwanted attention; it has given them more control. People like to sometimes go shopping or check out trade shows without having to worry about being pestered in their real life with annoying offers. Children are finding that they can be team leaders in some activity spaces, even directing unknowing adults, something that would never happen in real world groups, and thus fostering confidence in their own abilities and leadership. People with disabilities can have others not focus on the first thing that comes to mind when seeing them in real life and can sometimes find more acceptance in online worlds where all looks are equal essentially. And for some activities, such as games and roleplaying, some people just like to keep that aspect of their lives private without perceived repercussions of others knowing that they cavort as an elf archer in a fantasy game some eves – all of which helps drive business for vendors of such.

Granted, there are serious negative aspects to these as well. Social stagnation, excessive distraction and dependence on virtual worlds, failure in general to engage the real world are all real concerns that people need address. But my issue is not to judge the validity and use of virtual worlds but to offer thoughts on how to best apply them. Change is a constant and all socially impacting technologies are going to require people to reassess their values and try to reapply these to the new challenges faced by work and interaction with these tools.

One of the ways we can and should think about how to best apply the uses of the virtual world in relation to anonymous versus identified/verified is to consider that any Virtual Web is just an extension of the Web, which itself is just an extension of the real world, encapsulated and drawn together by this new electronic phenomena. I'll make more of a case for this in Part 2, but appearance and identity should be thought of as two aspects, linked, but distinct. Just as we walk around the world dressed how we wish to be, our identities aren't (hopefully) demanded of us on every turn of the corner. But when we wish to engage our environment, say to purchase something or prove our qualifications to enter a space or engage an activity, then we must provide corroborating identification and means. The same is true of the Web. We are essentially anonymous and we can even represent ourselves as something other than the truth to some extent, but when presented with the need to function, we must present the validated means of access or payment. And function is the key word here. The function of engaging a virtual space in a social or social activity context is not the same as conducting business. They are two distinct uses of a virtual space. And when such a space contains both or all types of activity, such as a projected Virtual Web, then it must allow for all uses of that space.

Therefore, when conducting business or verification for access, I argue that there should be mechanisms for validating an identity that would not be tied to displayed name or surface appearance of an avatar. There is just no need for it. Validation, identity, payment, should all be "subcutaneous" aspects of an avatar account, accessible when needed, but unseen and inaccessible to others when not. It’s not much different than my changing clothes (going to a costume party or fishing even) but always carrying my wallet. Or in a Web sense, just shopping the Web but when I see something that strikes my fancy, I either have my credit card or I make use of the handy PayPal button. Until that point, they shouldn't know or care who I am (sorry to the marketing folks but I’m on the side of anonymity) until the point that I decide to buy.

The most likely aspect I see is that, unless a governing body, like the Web 3D Consortium, is able to shepherd all venues to a universal and interchangeable linked standard, that there will likely be many successful but mutually exclusive virtual worlds, each governed around an activity or set of activities. If there is to be a future encompassing Virtual Web, it will be more likely drawn from the most successful aspects of these offerings. Or, less likely, it will be a single offering that has captured the market. I'll examine some of these in Part 3. The sooner we can see the realization of a universal Virtual Web, the sooner we can realize the advantages that such a space will engender, as well as confront the challenges that it will bring. I'll go over the 15 core aspects that I would like to see included in Part 2.